Belgrade on the page: travel writers and the Balkans

About Belgrade on the page: travel writers and the Balkans

By the ULTIMATE Belgrade Editorial Team

For centuries, travellers crossing between Central Europe and the East have stopped at Belgrade, on its ridge above the meeting of the Sava and the Danube, and many of them wrote about it. Add the city’s own writers, from a Nobel Prize winner to the author of a novel shaped like a dictionary, and Belgrade turns out to be one of the great literary cities of the region.

The first travellers

In 1660 the great Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi came to Belgrade and described its fortress, mosques, markets and baths in his vast Book of Travels, one of the richest portraits of the city under Ottoman rule. In 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu stayed in Belgrade on her way to Constantinople with her husband, the British ambassador, and her letters from the journey became one of the classics of travel writing.

Eothen and the crossing from Zemun

In 1844 Alexander Kinglake published Eothen, an account of his journey to the East, and it opens on the river between Zemun and Belgrade, then the border between two empires. Crossing the Sava, he felt he was leaving one world for another. Stand today on Gardoš hill in Zemun, look across the water to the fortress, and you see the view that begins one of the best-loved travel books in English.

For centuries, travellers crossing between Central Europe and the East stopped at Belgrade, and many of them wrote about it.

Rebecca West’s great journey

In the late 1930s, Rebecca West travelled through Yugoslavia, and the result, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, published in 1941, is often called one of the greatest travel books ever written. Part journey, part history and part reflection, it spends many pages in Belgrade and remains a remarkable, enormous companion for any traveller in the region.

Along the Danube

The Danube has drawn writers too. Between 1933 and 1935, the young Patrick Leigh Fermor walked across Europe towards Constantinople, and Between the Woods and the Water, published in 1986, carries him down the river to the Iron Gates, east of Belgrade. Claudio Magris followed the river from its source to the Black Sea in Danube, published in 1986, a meditation on the cultures along its banks.

Belgrade’s own writers

Belgrade has a great literature of its own. Ivo Andrić, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961 for novels such as The Bridge on the Drina, lived in Belgrade until his death in 1975, and his apartment is now a museum. Miloš Crnjanski, author of Migrations, wrote a famous lament for the city; Danilo Kiš and Milorad Pavić, whose Dictionary of the Khazars was published in 1984 as a novel in the form of a lexicon, brought Belgrade writing to readers around the world.

Today’s Balkan travel writers

A new generation has found fresh ways to write about the region. The Bulgarian-born Kapka Kassabova explores the borderlands of Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey in Border, and the lakes of Ohrid and Prespa in To the Lake. Rudolf Abraham, a travel writer and photographer, has spent many years documenting Central and South-Eastern Europe, and wrote the walking guide to the Peaks of the Balkans trail through the mountains of Montenegro, Albania and Kosovo.

A reading list

Before you come, try Kinglake’s Eothen for the crossing from Zemun, Rebecca West for the depth of the region, Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina for the soul of the Balkans, and Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars for something completely different. Then, for the journey onwards, Kassabova and Leigh Fermor.

Our advice: visit the Ivo Andrić Museum, browse the bookshops of Knez Mihailova, have dinner at the Writers’ Club, Klub Književnika, and if you are here in late October, spend an afternoon at the Belgrade International Book Fair. Then take a book to Gardoš hill in Zemun and read the opening of Eothen looking across the river.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Belgrade on the page: travel writers and the Balkans before you go.